The present disclosure relates to a transmission apparatus, a transmission method, a reception apparatus, a reception method, and a computer program.
Recently, there has been an increase in the demand for transmission of multimedia data including video data and audio data, for example, with low delay via the Internet or some other transmission path. An example of such an application is so-called remote surgery, in which two medical treatment locations that are far away from each other are connected via the Internet or the like, moving images of the surgical scene are transmitted from the operating room at one of the locations, and a surgeon operates a surgical instrument in that remote operating room while viewing the images at his/her own location. In this remote surgery application, it is desirable for the moving images to be transmitted with a delay interval of no more than a few frames.
In view of such demands, for example, JP-A-2007-311924 proposes a compression method based on wavelet conversion that compresses each few lines in each picture of the moving images as one compressed and encoded block. In this method, compression and FEC processing can be started without waiting until all of the data in a picture has been input. Further, even when transmitting the compressed data over a network and displaying the data at the reception side, the decoding processing can be started before receiving all the data in a picture. Therefore, as long as the network propagation delay is sufficiently small, the technology disclosed in JP-A-2007-311924 enables moving images to be transmitted in real time with a delay interval of no more than a few frames.